Netflix's High Score documentary series has resurrected the discussion over why E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is considered one of the worst games ever made, and goes so far as to suggest that the game was directly responsible for kicking off the downfall of the video game industry's first boom period. E.T. was first released in the summer of 1982 and became an immediate hit, further cementing director Steven Spielberg's reputation as a premier escapist filmmaker while earning millions over a series of then-record-breaking weekends.
E.T.'s success also coincided with the first video game boom period, with the industry earning around $3.2 billion in revenue in 1983, the year after the film's release. With Atari developer Howard Scott Warshaw fresh off another video game adaptation of a Spielberg movie in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the decision was made to move forward with an E.T. video game pitch. With an already fervent fanbase and a track record of success, the reasons why E.T. is considered one of the worst games ever made remains a complicated but, in retrospect, predictable cocktail for failure that could have been avoided with better planning.
As discussed during episode one of High Score, E.T. was conceived over a 36-hour period of time, as Atari gave Warshaw very little time to think about the game's direction once he'd agreed to make it. After meeting with Spielberg - who famously asked Warshaw if the game could be more like Pac-Man, much to the developer's chagrin - Warshaw then had 5 weeks to completely build out the game from ground-up to meet Atari's expectations for a holiday sales release. For reference, it took Warshaw around 10 months to make the much more successful Raiders title, and it seems like that would've been a good idea for E.T., too. Part of why E.T. is considered one of the worst games ever made is it's abysmal gameplay, which features a critical lack of explanation of where to go, unfun mechanics like pitfalls that constantly interrupt any sort of flow, and graphics that weren't even strong during its time.
E.T. was supposed to be a major success, and because of that, Atari had millions of cartridges ready to ship to stores for the holiday season. Once people got their hands on the game, though, word quickly spread that it was terrible. Stores canceled orders of shipments and Atari was left with a huge amount of E.T. cartridges without a market for them. E.T. was the first "big" game that released as a supposed holiday must-have that disappointed and, because it was so well-known, its failure tarnished the industry as a whole. Consumers began to be more leery of game releases and, as companies churned out mediocre titles simply to cash in on the previous boom, the gaming industry was met with a catastrophic crash, as revenues peaked in 1983 and then plummeted to $100 million in 1985, a drop of over 96 percent.
The development time and lack of quality are the major reasons for why E.T. is considered one of the worst games ever made, but contextually, it's also because its release threatened to tank video games altogether. Thankfully, consumers were only a few years away from the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, which revitalized the Western market for video games and set it on the path to becoming the industry we know today. High Score is full of stories about dramatic misses and big hits, and while E.T. falls squarely into the former, there are plenty of other examples in the documentary of those games that, against all odds, changed entertainment for the better.